Guns Save Over Two Million Lives In America Every Year

Back in the fall of 1995, Florida State University criminologist Professor Gary Kleck published what is probably still to date the most comprehensive study ever conducted in the use of defensive arms by American citizens. His findings concluded that the American people use a gun to defend themselves and others over two million times a year. You read it right: over two million times a year.

Now, Professor Kleck reports that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has confirmed his statistics. Why haven’t you heard about it? Because the anti-Second Amendment CDC and their anti-Second Amendment cohorts in the mainstream media have hidden the report.

Daniel Zimmerman writes:

In the 1990s, the CDC itself did look into one of the more controversial questions in gun social science: How often do innocent Americans use guns in self-defense, and how does that compare to the harms guns can cause in the hands of violent criminals?

Now Kleck has unearthed some lost CDC survey data on the question. The CDC essentially confirmed Kleck’s results. But Kleck didn’t know about that until now, because the CDC never reported what it found.

The report goes on:

The CDC dug into the question of how often Americans defend themselves using firearms. And they did an impressive job of it, in Kleck’s opinion. The only problem with their findings was that they confirmed Kleck’s results.

Why is that a bad thing? Because based on his research, Kleck found that the number of defensive gun uses in the US was somewhere between 2.1 and 2.5 million per year, a huge multiple over the number of crimes involving firearms. Not the lower (though still significant number of 500,000) total that the CDC had claimed.

For those who wonder exactly how purely scientific CDC researchers are likely to be about issues of gun violence that implicate policy, Kleck notes that “CDC never reported the results of those surveys, does not report on their website any estimates of DGU (Defensive Gun Use) frequency, and does not even acknowledge that they ever asked about the topic in any of their surveys.”

Gee, why would they bury important results like that? It’s almost as if the white coats at the CDC would rather not publicize any findings that would cast a bad light on the argument for more control and restrictions of civilian-owned firearms.

Are you grasping this, my friends? American citizens use a gun in self-defense some 2.5 million times every year. That is over 6,800 times EVERY DAY. This absolutely dwarfs the numbers of Americans who are killed with guns.

FBI statistics report that 9,400 people are murdered with a gun each year in this country and 4,000 are murdered with instruments other than a gun. These are four-year averages from the most recent data (2013 – 2016).

So, for every one homicide committed in the United States with a gun, at least 266 lives are SAVED with a gun. And that statistic is actually very conservative, as there is no way of knowing exactly how many lives are truly saved each time a gun is used in self-defense. A large percentage of those DGU’s obviously involved multiple potential victims—i.e., family members, friends, neighbors, fellow retail customers, etc.—so the actual number of potential lives saved with a gun each year could realistically total well in excess of ten million.

Think of it: Up to ten million (or more) men, women, teenagers, children, babies, elderly people, disabled people, mothers, daughters, sisters, brothers, sons, fathers, grandfathers, grandmothers, husbands, wives, cousins, friends, neighbors, and fellow townsmen are potentially SAVED each year by the presence of a defensive firearm. And in a large percentage of the time, the mere presence of a gun averted a crime—the gun was not even fired.

I can personally attest to at least three occasions when the presence of a defensive firearm thwarted a crime against my family members. In each of these occasions, the gun was never fired; the mere sight of the gun was enough to scare the would-be assailants away. Who knows how violent those crimes would have been had they been fully carried out? How many of my family members would have been seriously injured or killed had not a defensive firearm been present? Thankfully, we will never know.

Businesses that prohibit customers from being armed in their establishments risk the lives of their employees and customers daily. The shooting at a Nashville Waffle House is just the latest example of this gun-free business establishment being victimized by a criminal with a gun—this one was a criminal who was already prohibited by law from having a gun, by the way. Yet Waffle House continues to insist that its restaurants be gun-free.

Of course, the Nashville Waffle House was not the first Waffle House to be the site of a criminal attack. The around-the-clock Waffle Houses are routinely and frequently the targets of violent crime.

In the Fort Myers Waffle House shooting, four men violently attacked a single patron in the restaurant who had the good sense to be carrying a concealed handgun in spite of Waffle House rules and shot one of his attackers in self-defense. All the attackers fled the scene, and the criminal who was shot died before his partners in crime could get him to a hospital.

Yet Waffle House management is so fanatically anti-Second Amendment, not only does it prohibit its patrons from being armed in its restaurants (good luck with that in Montana) but also its employees and SECURITY GUARDS. Truly, the corporate executives at Waffle House are a bunch of imbeciles—and so is anyone who would frequent a Waffle House restaurant (or any other restaurant) WITHOUT being armed.

Then, of course, the big news this week was how the driver of a van in Toronto, Canada, killed ten people and injured fifteen others by deliberately running them over with his van. Will we hear any calls from the media for bans on “assault” vans? This is not the first time this kind of mass killing has taken place (London, England; Barcelona, Spain; and Muenster, Germany; for example). So, where is the call for “van control”?

You and I both know that the gun control Nazis are not interested in public safety. If they were, they would be insisting that gun-free zones be eliminated and that as many people as possible be always armed and prepared to use those arms in the defense of themselves and others. The facts confirm Professor Kleck’s research that GUNS SAVE LIVES.

The issue is NOT public safety; it is not even gun control. The issue is people control or the complete and total control of people by government. A disarmed citizenry is totally helpless not only against the attacks from individual criminals but more importantly against the attacks from tyrannical government.

Totalitarian governments have murdered more people than all of the John Dillingers, Al Capones, Bonnie and Clydes, Stephen Paddocks, Adam Lanzas, and Eric Harris and Dylan Klebolds of the world combined.

R.J. Rummell’s exhaustive research in Death By Governmentchronicles the fact that over 262 million people were murdered by despotic governments around the world during the 20th century alone. And the one single common denominator in all of these government mass murders is that the people were disarmed before they were slaughtered.

America’s Founding Fathers put the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights specifically for the purpose of the American people reserving their right and duty to cast off oppressive government by ALWAYS vigilantly maintaining their right and duty to keep and bear arms—including and especially the AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle.

And as Professor Kleck has shown (and which has now been grudgingly confirmed by the CDC), the presence of a gun potentially saves the lives of at least 2.5 million people every year in this country.

It is critical that Christians and pastors understand their God-ordained duty of always maintaining their means of self-defense. I believe these two messages and the one book will do MUCH to help clarify and explain this sacred Christian duty. I encourage you to order as many as you can for your family and friends.

P.P.S After researching this study, the initial publication issued this update:

You will note the original link doesn’t work right now. It was pointed out to me by Robert VerBruggen of National Review that Kleck treats the CDC’s surveys discussed in this paper as if they were national in scope, as Kleck’s original survey was, but they apparently were not. From VerBruggen’s own looks at CDC’s raw data, it seems that over the course of the three years, the following 15 states were surveyed: Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, Ohio, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. (Those states, from 2000 census data, contained around 27 percent of the U.S. population.) Informed of this, Kleck says he will recalculate the degree to which CDC’s survey work indeed matches or corroborates his, and we will publish a discussion of those fresh results when they come in. But for now Kleck has pulled the original paper from the web pending his rethinking the data and his conclusions.

But, I am confident that the move by the CDC to stop their research after 15 states only serves to confirm Professor Kleck’s data all the more. The CDC is a rabid anti-Second Amendment government bureaucracy, and the fact that their research matches Kleck’s in the 15 states that they surveyed is doubtless why they suspended their research. They KNEW their results would match Professor Kleck’s data across the board. Professor Kleck’s original data from 1995 has never been scientifically challenged, because the research is irrefutable.